Everyone knows that yawning is contagious. It's a mystery why and how, but if we see someone else yawning, we can barely suppress our own yawn. -
There are indications that something similar applies to coughing. At least in the concert hall, it can sometimes feel like coughing is spreading, contagious. During breaks, coughing often follows a familiar pattern. The conductor switches off, and then it starts. First with one gentle cough, and then the hall is full of coughing - as if it were an obligatory middle movement. - Or maybe it's not contagious, but a bad habit.
In Berlingeren, Søren Schauser has given the treatment a serious treatment. Based on the work of some English and German cough researchers, he explains that healthy people cough 16 times a day on average. Coughing twice an hour is also considered normal. By the way, we cough the most between 11am and 2pm - and that's during classical music events.
Schauser rumbles on with a little calculation: Even if you stick to the obligatory cough in class and sit between about 1000 other listeners, the hall will echo with coughs about every four seconds.
But it doesn't stop there. Because we animate each other to keep the frequency up.
Schauser points out a telling fact - that you hardly ever hear musicians cough during a concert. Not even the hard-pressed singers. And it can't be because musicians and singers are in better health than the rest of the population.
Evidence suggests that the concert situation itself generates coughs - and that coughs are contagious. This means we can do something about it. Two episodes confirm this. The aforementioned researchers draw attention to a telling story. At a concert in Hamburg, pianist Alfred Brendel stopped midway through and asked the audience to stop coughing. As a result, there was virtually no coughing for the rest of the concert. András Schiff did something similar at a concert in Tivoli a few years ago. He stopped playing and said ”Please, help me a little!”. The Tivoli concert hall was relatively quiet for the rest of the concert.
There are many indications that we can - by and large - stop coughing. That we can control the urge. By force of will.
The aforementioned research also concludes that coughing can be viewed in the same way as applause - as a concert-goer's urge to express themselves. Sitting passively receptive for hours goes against our desire or willingness to be part of the action. And there's probably another little well-known point - that a sign saying ’Keep off the grass’ provokes in many of us the need to take a stroll across the lawn. -
To summarise: we can do something about it. The researchers mentioned above have also studied hiccups, sneezes and yawns. They rarely occur as disturbing factors at concerts. This is despite the fact that we have no control over these expressions. But we can with coughing.
Of course, we can't eliminate coughing completely. The toad in the throat is a fact of life. Firstly, you obviously don't go to a concert if you have a chronic cough. But there's a lot you can do if you're overwhelmed by the urge to cough. Some suggestions: be aware of how you can control the urge to cough. - ’Save the cough’ for passages where the music is loud. - Cough during breaks. - Have water/pastilles ready. - Cough into your handkerchief or ’down your sleeve’.
Our members are civilised and experienced concert-goers. So there's reason to believe that there's a lot of experience and advice about coughing among friends. So: let us hear from you!